The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [138]
“Boys don’t know what to do with you,” my mom said. “I told you so.”
I shrugged. But I detected a hint of pride in her voice, instead of sympathy.
We lingered for a while after the plates had been cleared from our table. The cluster of the business lunch-hour crowd had wound down a bit, and tables were beginning to empty. I had to get back to my office, though, so I said good-bye to my mom and uncle and headed off. My mom, as usual, took care of the check.
I slipped quietly back to my cubicle after the long lunch break. I nudged my mouse across the pad to light up the screen. A large, retouched photo of another flatware collection appeared, reminding me of the words I had been dredging up to describe it an hour before.
Being with Jo-Jo that afternoon reminded me of something he’d said a few months before. It was on Easter, and we’d both gone to my parents’ house in New Jersey for a home-cooked feast of rack of lamb. Jo-Jo and I rode the train back to the city together afterward. It was Sunday, and we both had to get up for work the next day. We’d talked about my blog and eating experiment for a while, sitting across from each other on the vinyl seats. It was always nice to have some one-on-one time with my uncle.
My uncle and I actually have a long history of being on trains together, and having alone time. When I was little, my uncle loved to take me to museums and galleries in New York. We’d roam around the Metropolitan Museum of Art or Soho, and along the way he’d tell me stories about my parents from before I was born, or from his and my mother’s childhoods in Taiwan. Once I got a little bit older, he’d take me shopping in the East Village. There we’d rummage through secondhand boutiques, my uncle picking choice finds for me to try on, and taking hats off the racks and mannequins to place on my head. Jo-Jo was a men’s clothing designer. So when I developed a fondness for vintage clothing and ramshackle costume jewelry as a teenager, he was the only one in my family who actually shared some interest in it with me.
Every now and then, my uncle would offer some sort of prophesying wisdom that would really stick with me and make me think. One Thanksgiving or Christmas, when I was in college studying creative writing, we were sitting on the couch talking when he told me that some people are only truly creative for a certain period of their lives. Some people just lose their creativity after this spell. Inspiration is fleeting, or even fickle, is what I took from that conversation. Since then, I’ve always tried to seize the moment whenever creativity struck. It’s what happened when I became so obsessive about cooking, living in that apartment with Erin. So I started a food blog. I also took away the sense that only really meaningful work springs from honest, unstoppable creativity. In other words, only write something, only do something, only create something, if you’re really passionate about it. Don’t force something out or beat a dead horse.
My uncle himself had experienced periods of drought in his passion for design. He’d gone on a hiatus from his career once, when I was young, and retreated to a Buddhist camp in California for a few months. He took off to Taiwan and China a number of years later, and rekindled his interest in photography, taking remarkable photos of classical Chinese subjects. Most recently, he’d dropped everything in his life to take care of my ailing grandfather for almost one year. Over lunch in Koreatown, my mother kept voicing